BREAKING NEWS

Nuevo Laredo media go silent on violence

Threats, distrust and uncooperative sources take toll on coverage of crimes that involve drugs

MARIANO CASTILLO, San Antonio Express-news

Published
5:30 am CDT, Friday, September 29, 2006

NUEVO LAREDO — For some time now, this city's gunfire has found its echo in silence.

Even the border city's freewheeling and competitive news media — until this year the noisy barometers of an ongoing struggle between two drug cartels — have abandoned their traditional role.

It was a gradual shutdown, but by summer it was complete. In the latest example, a 30-minute shootout Sept. 22 in a ritzy part of the city went unreported by local media.

"Call it self-censorship," said Raymundo Ramos, a former police reporter who now runs a local news Web site. "This is a silenced press, enforced because there is no guarantee for our safety."

One veteran reporter described the state of Nuevo Laredo police reporting like this: "I see, I hear, I shut up."

When the turf war for control of smuggling routes into Texas ratcheted up two years ago, victims' families were the first to keep quiet. They learned that if their loved ones disappeared — or worse — there was no point in reporting it because the police were no help, and talking about the cases left them vulnerable to threats.

Estimates of the number of people kidnapped in Nuevo Laredo in the past few years run to more than 400, and the majority go unreported, Mexican and U.S. officials said.

As assassins began picking off law enforcement and civic officials, such as Police Chief Alejandro Dominguez in June 2005, government voices were reduced to a whisper.

Business owners were next. Tired of extortion and realizing the violence was scaring off customers, some simply moved their operations to the Texas side of the border to Laredo.

All this time, the city's newspapers did a brisk business with brash headlines and bloody photos of victims. Radio stations interrupted programming for breaking news of gunbattles and killings. But Nuevo Laredo news organizations have succumbed. They no longer cover their most important story.

Reporters and editors have walked a thin line since gunmen attacked the newsroom of the city's largest paper in February. They started running shorter stories on the violence, stating only the most basic facts and not linking it to the drug trade. During the summer, even that stopped. Since August, hardly a word of drug-related violence made it into print or on the air.

Events that would be front-page news anywhere else — a sextuple homicide, a shooting incident said to have wounded three soldiers — went unreported in Nuevo Laredo, even as they were covered by national media, the foreign press and wire services and disseminated worldwide.

Local reports once triggered much of this coverage, so the local blackout has conveyed a false appearance that the violence has greatly subsided. The Gulf Cartel, which controls the area, "wants the city to appear calm so they won't send more federal police here," a local reporter said.

The police reporters in this city are not fighting back, let alone speaking with one voice. Unity is hampered by distrust. Reporters know some other journalists are spies for the drug cartels, jotting down the names of journalists who show up at certain incidents.